Have you ever thought about how stupid someone looks when they come?
You should read Sex Criminals.
It’s so good. It’s really good. It’s brilliantly good.
The series is about Suzie and John, two people with a kind of a superpower: when they orgasm, time stops. They team up to rob banks.
The premise is silly, and the book is frequently silly — creators Matt Fraction and Chip Zdarsky do not shy away from an opportunity to make a dumb joke and really milk it. There’s a kind of glee to the sex-themed story of cops-and-robbers that they’re telling here. Their joy is infectious: every lovingly rendered o-face and incredibly detailed sex shop (do yourself a favor and really look at those bookcases Zdarsky took so much time to draw) is a wonder to behold. Fraction and Zdarsky are laughing at the madness of sex and the way our culture talks about it. However, what makes the series work is the way Sex Criminals addresses the kind of vacuum of information about sex more adeptly, more honestly, and more seriously than any piece of media I’ve ever consumed.
I mean this honestly. Reading a comic book with a female protagonist with the word “sex” in the title is a kind of roulette, but Suzie is sincerely one of the most real characters in any piece of fiction I’ve ever read. And the thing is, John, her partner in crime, is too. And their realness — their humor, their anxieties, their honesty — makes a series that could read as exploitative into something brutally, hilariously honest instead.
Remember in middle school, when the only reliable source of information about sex was a kid in the grade above you who would tell you things when the teachers weren’t listening? Or the first time you saw a piece of pornography? Or just not knowing what sex is, or how it worked? Somehow it was all everyone talked about, but no one would answer those questions you had? I’d never read anything that spoke so truly to that experience, or that anxiety of becoming one of those girls. I never expected to find this kind of honesty in a comic book. In framing this conversation about sex through such well developed characters, Sex Criminals becomes more than dick jokes. It’s something strangely heartfelt.
It’s a comic book you can probably never talk to your parents about, and it’s one that you have to be careful googling the name of (“Sex Criminals comic book” instead of “Sex Criminals”). But it’s good. It’s so good. It’s probably the best thing I’ve read this year. The MLLL has the first two trade paperbacks. Read them. You’ll laugh. You’ll cry. You’ll think about that face you make when you come. Or when you do kegels.